David Brooks Quotes

I'm not good at watching myself.

I trust you to find the good in me, but the bad I must be sure you don't overlook.

Many leadership problems are driven by low self-awareness.

"I know quite enough of myself," said Bella, with a charming air of being inclined to give herself up as a bad job, "and I don't improve upon acquaintance..."

I can talk about humility, but I'm not humble. I mean, if you say, I'm humble, you've just contradicted yourself. But I'm trying to be, man, I'm trying so hard.

My personality doesn't interest me.

'What am I missing?' is a much more important question than 'How cool am I?'

You have to attempt to be objective about yourself.

I've always been a very self-aware person.

I think I'm pretty self-aware.

The true cure for self-righteousness is self-knowledge.

Self knowledge begins with the neighbor, the mirror, and just the same with true self-love; that goes from the mirror to the matter.

I have as big of an ego as it gets, but I have, stunningly, a lot of humility considering some of the accomplishments I've had.

I'm really good at judging and observing other people, but not myself.

That is the hardest thing of all. It is much harder to judge yourself than to judge others. If you succeed in judging yourself, it's because you're truly a wise man.

Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of the naïve ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher's ideals are.

Self-love is a good thing but self-awareness is more important. You need to once in a while go ‘Uh, I’m kind of an asshole.’

To know yourself you have only to set down a true statement of those that ever loved or hated you.

From childhood I was compelled to concentrate attention upon myself. This caused me much suffering, but to my present view, it was a blessing in disguise for it has taught me to appreciate the inestimable value of introspection in the preservation of life, as well as a means of achievement.

It is a whole lot easier to see our problems in others than it is to see them in ourselves.

Without humility, we keep all our defects; and they are only crusted over by pride, which conceals them from others, and often from ourselves.

Get to know yourself. Know your own failings, passions, and prejudices so you can separate them from what you see. Know also when you actually have thought through to the nature of the thing with which you are dealing and when you are not thinking at all... Knowing yourself and knowing the facts, you can judge whether you can change the situation so it is more to your liking. If you cannot--or if you do not know how to improve on things--then discipline yourself to the adjustments that will be necessary.

We justify ourselves when we should judge ourselves. If we learned humility, it might spare us the humiliation.

If you don't look at yourself and evaluate it, you instead see how the world's reacting to it.

I must congratulate myself, in passing, for never having lost the ability to examine my conscience, never having lost the gift of finding myself wanting & defective. Why fear the criticism of others when you, yourself, are first out of the critical gate? If self-denigration is the race I am the winner, even before the starting gun. Collect the bets.